Culture

Ups and Downs: How Much Should I Pay for Dead Body Parts?

Up: When Advertisers get me: The irony of the near-complete media saturation of our culture is that more than ever, teenagers are complaining that advertisers don’t understand how to communicate with today’s youth.* WELL NO MORE. Who knew that it would take a beverage company–The Dr. Pepper-Group, to be specific–to identify with the pressing needs of adolescents? To wit:

This company gets it. Case closed. I can’t count the number of occasions in which I’ve found myself playing frisbee and hacky-sack on a beach in Maryland with my sexually attractive and racially diverse group of friends only to hear a mysterious voice coming through the clouds. “Is that God?” asks one of my companions. “No,” I say, “It’s Jared Leto,” and we begin to run westward through the Midwest and the plains states, across the desert and the Rockies until we reach California. It takes 7 1/2 months, we lose most of our party to dysentery, and by the time we get there I realize that I absent-mindedly forgot to put on shoes and have literally worn my feet away to the point where I’m walking on my shin bones. I black out for 14 hours and when I come to, I run into the ocean with what’s left of my abnormally good-looking group of friends.

Those are the kind of lengths we go to for the tangy citrus of Sunkist, because it’s the only thing that really motivates us teenagers anymore. We’re politically apathetic, our sexual icons are god damn vampires and we have to pretend to like Lady Gaga. The only thing that makes life worth living is orange-flavored soda. At least one company understands that.
*I’m basing this less on any verifiable facts, and more on my need to set up this long joke. Deal with it.

Down: How much do you want for my nipples? The Associated Press reported this week that a partial set of dentures worn by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill fetched 15,200 pounds (or more than $23,000) at London’s annual You Must Be Fucking Joking!? Historical Auction. The AP notes that the teeth were “only” valued at 5,000 pounds, and thus sold for more than three times the estate value. I was going to make a bunch of witty and incisive political jokes about Neville Chamberlain’s teeth being unavailable for sale because he gave them to Hitler, but in the process of researching this story I found out that 1) Napoleon’s penis still exits, and 2) Someone once paid close to $40,000 for it.

I’m not joking. The story goes that the Abbé who delivered Napoleon’s last rites also took his penis after his death (which is pretty much standard practice; I’ve instructed my lawyer to collect/sell my testicles when I kick the bucket). Sold and inherited many times since 1821, the exact location of the penis today is in dispute, thought the last known purchase of it came in 1969 by American urologist John Kingsley Lattimer, who paid $38,000. In the last decade, it was rumored to have been purchased by an anonymous bidder for close to $50,000. What kind of sick person spends that much money on the decomposed penis of a long-dead European tyrant?

Seriously though, if you guys want to see it, I’ll be home all day tomorrow.

Up: You’re making me look bad! If you know me, then you probably know that I’ve long planned to become a millionaire by the age of 28, so that I can retire at 30 and finally spend my days watching reruns of “Moesha” and “In Living Color.” I just checked my bank account, and I’m several hundred thousand dollars short of my goal (like, $990,000 short) with only two years to go.

At this rate I’m going to have to adopt the life plan of Emillio Navarro, who is not only the sole surviving player from MLB’s Negro American League, but is also the oldest working human being in America. At 104 years old, Navarro walks without a cane, doesn’t use glasses and still keeps the financial record books at the games machine business he started. He also drinks whiskey, which officially makes him cooler than most people my age. Probably stronger, too.

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To be fair Ryan, Jared Leto makes everything more epic than it should be. The same song is in the end credits of Dragon Age and I never felt more accomplished while simultaneously realizing I wasted 48 hours of collective time pretending I was an elven archer.

Ryan P

Come on, you are.

Ryan P

Come on, you are.

Anonymous

A Drow Elf, maybe.

Amy D.

I don’t play Drow. Drows are for assholes.

Anonymous

Then you must have a stack of character sheets! ZING!

Anonymous

A Drow Elf, maybe.

Anonymous

It seems as if we had the same goals, when I was your age. The good news is that by not reaching your goal of becoming a millionaire by 30, all the other dissapointments in life won’t be so jarring.